Yiannis Zaimakis is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Local Societies and Director of the Social Analysis and Applied Social Research Laboratory at the University of Crete. He is also member of the Academic Supervision Committee in the Master Program ‘Sport Studies: Sociology, History and Anthropology’ at Hellenic Open University. His research focuses on social and solidarity economy, street activism and political graffiti, sociology of popular music and Rebetika, sport cultures and identities.

Abstract

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with key informants of grassroots alternative organisations in anti-austerity Greece, the study sheds light on the structures of meanings of invisible voices, revealing the motives, worldviews and value-systems that lay behind their actions. Using critical discourse analysis, the text offers a thorough understanding of the meaning and experience of building social and economic experiments with transformative potential within the solidarity economy alternative, in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The narratives of solidarity economy informants reveal militant investigations, ro-mantic humanism, egalitarian goals and an ethos of collectivism that call into question the prevalent capi-talist imaginary. Participants employ utopian thinking, imagining a future that departs significantly from what we know. They call on us to re-assess hegemonic values and norms in the light of alternative realities which embody forms of workers' cooperativism, participatory actions and ways of being, which prefigure the future vision of another form of social life.

Bauhardt C. (2014), “Solutions to the Crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy: Alternatives to the Capitalist Growth Economy from an Ecofeminist Economics Perspective”, Ecological Economics, 102: 60-68.

Böhm S., A. Diverstein, and A. Spicer (2010), “(Im)possibilities of Autonomy: Social Movements in and beyond Capital, the State and Development”, Social Movement Studies, 9 (1): 17-32.

Laville J.L. (2014), “The Social and Solidarity Economy: A Theoretical and Plural Framework”, in J. Defourny, L. Hulgard, and V. Restoff (eds.), Social Enterprise and the Third Sector: Changing European Landscapes in a Comparative Perspective, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 102-113.

Papadaki M., S. Kalogeraki (2017), “Social Support Actions as Forms of Building Community Resilience at the Onset of the Crisis in Urban Greece: The Case of Chania”, Partecipazione e Conflitto, 10 (1): 193-220.